Lisa McInerney - The Glorious Heresies

There’s a piano in the lobby. I spot it when we’re walking in and then it grows and grows until it’s all I can think about. I’m not usually waylaid by pianos on nights out. I don’t spend every second social occasion fantasising about enormous inanimate objects that one time used to mean something to me. But I’ve been fucked these past three weeks. I’ve been sick, and tired, and dizzy, and dead. And so that fucking piano is taunting parts of me I kept well covered until temporary madness stripped back the skin and left me beaten and bleeding. You couldn’t play me now , it says. Your fingers have fused, your mind’s gone grey, you’re deaf, you’re blind, you’re dumb. You’re nothing.

It’s Karine’s twenty-first birthday.

Her mam and dad have organised this serious shindig. Hotel, bar extension, DJ, canapés, cocktails, everyone she’s ever met in her fucking life, this cake with white chocolate flowers all over it that I swear to God would kill someone if it fell on them. She’s got everyone dressed in either black or white so she’s the only one wearing colour. She’s flitting about in this turquoise dress, making sure everyone’s all right, that they’re all having fun, that they know everyone they’re supposed to know. And what am I doing? I’m stuck to the railing of the terrace outside, smoking over the river, dead to it all but that piano in the lobby and the dirge it’s playing for everything I’m not.

I don’t want to be here. Today is the first day I left the house since they discharged me from the hospital, three weeks ago. Karine had to cry to get me moving and even then I registered the tears with… I don’t know. I don’t want to make her cry. I’m sick of making her cry. But it’s like I don’t have any real will to stop it. I can hear her and I want to reach for her and hold her in my arms and tell her I’m sorry and that I’ll snap out of it but I can’t, because I’m a million miles away, lost in the dark, and I can’t get to her.

But I can breathe. I can move around. I can eat and sleep and watch telly. Sometimes I can’t believe it. I’ll be three spoons into a bowl of Weetabix and suddenly I’ll ask myself, Well, how’d you do that, boy? How’d you get here?

Y’know how many times I’ve fucked Karine since that night? Twice. In three fucking weeks. And only because she insisted that making me hard would cure me. She stripped for me, she sucked me, she whispered I could have it any way I wanted it… and it was grand, once I got going. But once it was done I was back underground. Like, Oh, that was nice, but it’s not for the likes of me. I don’t deserve it . Worse, I don’t want it.

Maybe it’s guilt, for Georgie. Slow-burn kind of guilt. Maybe the adrenalin was always supposed to take six months to bleed me out.

Maybe it’s just that I did so much coke I wasted all my feelings. A whole lifetime of emotion honked through in a couple of years.

Maybe it’s just that I’m so wrapped up in replaying the day I nearly hit my girlfriend that I can’t feel anything else, like I’ve been rolled up in a bit of old carpet and dropped into the sea.

But then surely all she’d need to do to cure me is forgive me? And she has. She has because she thinks I tried to kill myself at Halloween, with a bottle of tablets and a bottle of Jameson, like an ould hag.

No. Coz if I’d wanted to kill myself I would have just shot myself.

Joseph comes out to me on the terrace.

‘It’s pussy central in there,’ he gasps.

I might be a corpse but I’ve noticed him chatting up one of the other nurses for the past hour. Karine’s best mate Louise is usually Joseph’s fuckbuddy. There’ll be drama there before long.

All I can say is ‘Yeah.’

‘You all right, boy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You don’t look all right.’

‘I’m OK,’ I tell him, but he’s hovering, so after I finish my smoke I go inside with him, and the place is hopping, really hopping. I go to the bar and order a beer.

Karine is back over beside me. ‘I thought you weren’t drinking?’

I’m not supposed to be. I told her I’d knock it on the head for a while and see if that helps me stop making a total arse of myself in front of the entire city. I don’t particularly want a drink, as it happens, but the whole place is staring at me. The whole fucking place.

‘It’s only one,’ I tell her.

‘Yeah, I know, but…’ She’s fixing the collar of my suit jacket, and I know there’s nothing wrong with it. ‘Y’know, maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should give yourself a chance to… I dunno, come back to yourself.’

Yeah, maybe. And in the meantime the vultures are circling and the eyes on Mammy and Daddy D’Arcy are turning into pinpricks of hate and the room is whispering Poor Ryan, poor poor Ryan, don’t you know he tried to top himself? Para-fucking-cetamol, like an amateur. But you know about him, don’t you? You know his mother drove drunk into a ditch. Vehicular suicide. Imagine. Poor Ryan. Look at him not drinking, he can’t drink anymore, like, can’t be trusted with it, neither his dad nor his mam could be trusted with it.

‘It’s all under control now, though,’ I tell Karine. ‘No difference anymore between me and the next man.’

‘OK,’ says Karine. ‘Just be careful, though.’

I take a sip and walk away. Careful , like. I know what she means. Don’t lose the temper and don’t lose hope. No chance of that now. It’s lost and gone and her boyfriend’s empty.

By the door I turn back. The dance floor is full. Joseph’s shifting the nurse. Someone’s rubbing Louise’s back. Gary D’Arcy is watching me over his pint. Karine is twirling in her turquoise dress and her subjects are moving around her like dancers in formation, like snowflakes in the sky, like shitty little bangers around a falling star. And I don’t deserve her. I can’t feel sad about that, because I’ve broken myself, but I know it because it’s that sharp and true.

I put the beer on the ledge behind me and walk out of the function room and down to the lobby and approach that vicious fuck of a piano as it goads me, You couldn’t do it, boy, the music’s stopped , and I walk past it as my throat closes up, as the last of the fight goes out of me, You waster, Cusack, you piece of shit, your girlfriend’s twenty-first and you’re walking out, she’ll never forgive you for this , I get to the door and out into the winter, Pathetic, fucking pathetic, why’d you even bother trying to kill yourself, don’t you know you killed yourself years and years ago, when you stopped hearing the music and started listening to the city…

I’m nearly home by the time she calls me.

‘Where’d you go, boy?’ She’s worried.

‘I just had to go, girl. I shouldn’t have come at all. I can’t do this.’

‘But I need you here. Don’t do this to me tonight, Ryan. Please!’

I could be back there in half an hour, at her side, holding her up when she got tipsy, giving her the first and the last of her twenty-one kisses. I could be there for her but I won’t be. I can’t. It’s done. My city stretches in the dark, and I can no more go back than go forward.

It’s a shithole, but of course it is, because it’s cheap and Georgie doesn’t work long enough or hard enough to afford anything else. Not since the first landlord, in her illustrious career as fucker and fuckee, has she had someone back to her own space, but she has already thought it through and accepted that Ryan’s different. And besides, he’s intimated that there will be cocaine, and a little party, and as weird as the whole thing is — and it is weird, because she’s known him since he was a boy — she reckons he’ll make it worth her while. Look, she should have known better than to try to shame morals into him. She thinks that a few decent lines will cushion the blow of reality winning out, yet again.